[Foundation-l] How not to manage opensource project

[Elisabeth Bauer]

Anthere wrote:

> As far as I (as a board member) is concerned, I consider the Foundation 
> to be there to "support" the projects. Absolutely not to govern them.
> By support, I mean "provide infrastructure", "provide legal frame", help 
> set up collaborations to collect/create content, help distribution of 
> the content created. Not govern. Not manage.

What you mention here are of course the most important tasks of the 
foundation. However, my position is a bit different to yours. IMO the 
foundation has also the duty to step in as an emergency government in 
case the self government of a projects doesn't work. But this should 
always be a temporary measure and restricted to single actions.

I'm thinking here for example of cases like the quran quote in the site 
notice of the urdu wikipedia. If the community in a wiki acts against 
the core principles of Wikimedia, for example violates the neutrality, 
it needs someone external to set it right. Of course this is something 
which could also be done by the international community except that this 
is not a body with any authority but a bunch of loosely connected 
individuals with diverse opinions.

> Some editors try to push us in "governing the project", and I can not 
> blame them. When decisions are tough to take collectively, it is quite 
> easy to ask a small group of people to take the responsability of making 
> a decision.
> But imho, pretty often, this should not be the job of the Foundation.

And in rare cases, it should be - or the foundation decides to delegate 
these cases to a "Wiki Emergency response team" (WERT ;-) which takes 
care of cases like
* HELP, all sysops of our Wikipedia are quitting and there is a big 
fight over the ban of an editor!!!
* Why disturb readers of our Wiki with a sitenotice about some 
irrelevant board elections? Let's rather display the football results there
* We want to know more about our readers - let's just record every page 
view on an external logfile via the global javascript...
* ...

This team could take over the task individual board members do now: find 
out what's going on, talk to the involved parties, try to moderate 
conflicts and find solutions.

> The problem with this is that one of the board members (Jimbo) not only 
> is on the board, but also the foundator and for the english wikipedia 
> the visionary/leader guy. Quite naturally, Jimbo has a lot of influence 
> on how things are organised and on policies. This influence is much more 
> limited in non english languages. The enwikipedia is governed by Jimbo 
> because it accepts to be governed. But it is not governed by the board.

good explanation.

> Seems like just "chatting" to you ? Seems not important ?
> 
> Then, give a thought to editors trying to publish a wikijunior on 
> internet (activity plainly allowed by our licence), to see it removed 
> within 24 hours after announcement on this very list.

Could you be a bit less cryptic here, please, and explain what you are 
refering to?

greetings,
elian